Meet Kalina Nikolova

For almost 30 years, I have led strategy and operations at large companies: Yahoo, Viacom, Match Group, Deloitte and Zenith Media. My career has been built on navigating complex growth and forcing the hard trade-offs at pivotal business moments.

Now I bring that same strategic and operational clarity to companies at a turning point, from founder-led businesses to large enterprises. The work covers the big choices, the money behind them and the model that delivers them, across five areas: Strategy, Customers & Go-to-Market, Portfolio & Investment, Operating Model & Organization, and Execution.

AI is what lets this work go further. Good strategy has always been limited by how much research, analysis and synthesis a team could afford. AI moves that limit. It's the ultimate amplifier, giving a single, highly experienced advisor the horsepower of an entire consulting team. I use it as my invisible engine to synthesize your data, test more options and get you to a clear decision faster. The judgment and the hard calls stay human. That's the part I bring.

I also sit on the Advisory Board of the Outthinker Strategy Network, a community of chief strategy officers, and I write. On my Substack, I dig into how AI is reshaping strategy and operations: the new competitive moats in the AI age, who really owns the decisions AI touches, how information moves (and breaks) inside an organization, and what stays distinctly human as the tools get sharper. It's practitioner writing, and I hope you find it useful. Subscribe to Humans + AI Lab.